Who Has the Power, actually?

The Power by Naomi Alderman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Let's talk y'all. Because my gut says this book is 3 stars at best... but here I am still thinking and pondering it, and that deserves a closer look.

What's really getting to me is: What is the message here?

Alderman seems to be poking around the big "What if?" of it all. "What if women had power?" Would anything really change?

It's hard for me to rationally accept that this particular thing would happen. Yes, there are plenty of historically terrible matriarchs, but considering the modern setting, it's difficult for me to place modern women, with very different survival needs, into this broadly power-hungry mold.

Then there's the actual violence within the narrative. It is so wildly graphic and extreme, that it requires an almost complete suspension of belief. Feral gangs of women mass raping, killing, and kidnapping? Ludicrous. At one point I thought maybe the excessively detailed descriptions were an attempt on the author's part to get this onto a screen. Considering there is an adaptation, I might not be far off.

And then, we have the lack of "good ones". Where are all the families that would band together? We get a few token nods, but nothing on the scale that feel correct. There's no way, as a woman and a mother, that I would just allow this. Would I lose? Probably. But where is that push-back?

Instead of answering the question with nuance, Alderman has dropped a nuclear bomb and sacrificed a compelling, and frankly persuasive, argument on equality. There is something to be said for the idea that satire needs extremes to make the point, but this feels more like we threw in a bunch of tropes to try to make a complex idea stick.

Then again, maybe that's all part of the book's "brilliance"? But if "history is told by the victors", I need a better argument than this novel presents. I want to feel it in my bones that women are actually the terrible creatures men believe them to be. That we need to be oppressed for the good of civilization. Otherwise, it's just another argument in favor of the patriarchy.

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